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DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

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Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#31

Post by SwellJoe »

I've been astounded at how rare it is for a search API to offer date information. I talked to Gabriel about the problem many moons ago, and even with their significantly greater clout (than a random dude working on a tiny project that uses search engine APIs), and despite asking for it, they couldn't get that info from their partners. So, it's good to see they finally made it happen with Yahoo.

But, I thought the Yahoo BOSS search API was gone, and the only way to use Yahoo search was basically just a black box sort of deal (i.e., you pass them the query and they hand you results, which you display as yahoo sent them). I'm not sure I understand what DDG is doing, and when you'd hit those Yahoo results. It's especially convoluted since Yahoo gets its results from Bing, right?

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#32

Post by robszumski »

pwnna wrote: post #10

I think a better link to explain is here: https://duck.co/help/results/yahoo-technical-implementation It looks like they are just querying yahoo for results and ads as a proxy and it sounds like, through some contractual/technical limitations, they have to make that request from a yahoo controlled domain name (duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net). However, they say they fully control the server and yahoo does not get t…

So they data mine this traffic at the nameserver level, just to reasonably say that DDG doesn't share info? Making it technically your computer sharing the info, by way of their forced implementation? Seems like the ad blockers are making the right move here.

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#33

Post by SwellJoe »

latj wrote: post #29
GauntletWizard wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some truth to the pattern, though; Once you're no longer the underdog, those seeking power will seek you out, and it's hard to prevent infiltration by the power-hungry.

Good things dont scale. Sergey Brin & Larry Page could have been the old Japanese man in the subway station sushi joint making the the best bites of a lifetime for a few hundred humans a day. They decided to go a different route.

I don't think I follow. A good web search engine cannot be a niche product with a few users. The bigger the resources, the better the results. That's an impossible problem to overcome by merely being really good at something. DDG overcomes it, reasonably effectively, by getting results from a huge list of partners.

If there weren't huge companies offering search APIs, DDG simply couldn't compete with Google (without massive scale of their own). As it is, DDG still provides somewhat weaker results in some cases; it is still my primary search engine on all of my devices, and I like it, but when I'm frustrated by the results, I make use of !g and usually find what I'm looking for.

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#34

Post by SwellJoe »

ausvisaissues wrote: post #19
0xmohit wrote: post #15

For the record, this isn't really news . A lot of details can be found at https://duck.co/help/results/yahoo-technical-implementation https://duck.co/help/results/sources also states that they partner with Yahoo!, and in some regions and scenarios, Yandex and Bing.

Different topic: Why do they use www.duck.co as their development url and www.duckduckgo.com as their search engine name? The latter is just way too long to type. Especially for casual users who has google set at their main search engine. Compare URL lengths: duckduckgo.com 14 (10+4) google.com 10 (6+4) yahoo.com 9 (5+4) yandex.ru 9 (6+3) bing.com 8 (4+4) baidu.cn 8 (5+3) I really want to like duckduckgo, but the nam…

I can't remember the last time I typed in a search engine URL. I type my queries into my browser URL field and let it do the right thing. When I want Google, I use "!g query" (because DDG is my default, and that's how you tell it to redirect the query to Google).

Under what circumstances do you type in the name of your preferred search engine?

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#37

Post by greglindahl »

piplgobde wrote: post #35

Yeah been seeing the Yahoo logo on the bottom right of my DDG results, for a couple weeks now. Not going to be moving away because of this, we'll see if it gets even better.

I'm still getting Yandex, guess Gabe's algo suspects I'm not much of an ad clicker :-)

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#38

Post by mathgeek »

dcgoss wrote: post #13
organic_tech34 wrote: post #8

Privacy Statements are the tech equivalent of calling food organic. You need a reputable third party to audit your practices. Or your software needs to be open source so anyone can see what you're doing. I'll be switching from using DDG because of this. I don't trust Yahoo, and I barely trust DDG.

Ironically, your name is organic_tech34. For the record, the term "organic" is regulated by the USDA.

> the term "organic" is regulated by the USDA.

I think the point the previous poster was making is that even though it's regulated, there are so many black boxes that it's rather easy to sneak in a violation and no one notices (whether the company is doing it or it's accidental). Just look at how many organic product recalls happen in any given year due to various causes.

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#39

Post by jsmthrowaway »

robszumski wrote: post #32
pwnna wrote: post #10

I think a better link to explain is here: https://duck.co/help/results/yahoo-technical-implementation It looks like they are just querying yahoo for results and ads as a proxy and it sounds like, through some contractual/technical limitations, they have to make that request from a yahoo controlled domain name (duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net). However, they say they fully control the server and yahoo does not get t…

So they data mine this traffic at the nameserver level, just to reasonably say that DDG doesn't share info? Making it technically your computer sharing the info, by way of their forced implementation? Seems like the ad blockers are making the right move here.

This comment is puzzling, since authoritative nameservers only see actual end-user traffic on an occasional basis given the cornucopia of resolver caches in near-unanimous use (as well as the fat TTL on the yahoo.net side of the delegation). This denies Yahoo! the reliable data that you seem to think they've successfully pulled over on everyone, at least if I understand your comment correctly which I'll admit I'm having a hard time doing.

It's also an odd concern given that most everybody these days uses Google or their ISP's resolvers which would be far more interesting "nameserver level data mining." (I have a hard time believing Google successfully logs that traffic in detail, however.)

Re: DuckDuckGo announces partnership with Yahoo

#40

Post by nl »

robszumski wrote: post #32
pwnna wrote: post #10

I think a better link to explain is here: https://duck.co/help/results/yahoo-technical-implementation It looks like they are just querying yahoo for results and ads as a proxy and it sounds like, through some contractual/technical limitations, they have to make that request from a yahoo controlled domain name (duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net). However, they say they fully control the server and yahoo does not get t…

So they data mine this traffic at the nameserver level, just to reasonably say that DDG doesn't share info? Making it technically your computer sharing the info, by way of their forced implementation? Seems like the ad blockers are making the right move here.

So they data mine this traffic at the nameserver level, just to reasonably say that DDG doesn't share info?

What does this mean? If you mean nameservers might get to see your IP, that isn't true. At most they'll see your primary DNS resolver's IP, but if you use Google DNS or Open DNS they will only see that (I've implemented CDNs, and this is a very big problem for them if they operate at the DNS level - which most do).

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